Partition: Socio/Politico Engineering, Induced Dispossession

A Plan to Dismember Afghanistan: The tortured, historical legacy of partition…is shrouded in bloodshed, anguish, familial dislocation, misery, and loss. Yet within the Obama Administration, this is but the most recent, though highly controversial strategy to as yet unfold for implementation in Afghanistan. Details of the plan were recently outlined in the U.S. Department of State Journal of Foreign Affairs: Written by Robert Blackwill, former U.S. Ambassador to India and National Security Adviser for Strategic Planning, who is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and currently serves as a senior foreign policy advisor to the President… has advocated just such a misguided policy. Washington insiders have articulated that this strategy appears as the administration’s response and recognition of burgeoning domestic and international anti-war sentiment, increasing casualties, both military and civilian, and a formula to stem the flow of expenditures currently in support of the administration’s counter-insurgency (COIN) strategy which now exceeds one trillion dollars.

As history dictates, asymmetrical warfare cannot be won by an occupying force that lacks the support of the people.  The war in Afghanistan, as currently prosecuted, has produced untold thousands of civilian casualties, shattered infrastructure, unemployment, hunger, medical emergency, and familial dislocation that cannot be addressed by an ill-informed, bureaucratic plan to dismember the country in the unmentioned name of political expediency.  The only just and viable plan for Afghanistan is an immediate ceasefire, the convening of all-inclusive negotiations, followed by an unambiguous timetable announcing the complete withdrawal of ISAF Contingent Forces from the country.

Social Engineering: Blackwill’s plan calls for Coalition troops from the east and south to be redeployed to the northern reaches of the country.  Under the plan, U.S. Special Forces and air-power would be cast in supporting and or auxiliary roles for the Afghan Army and the government in Kabul.  What has not been addressed, however, is whether or not the Taliban would recognize such a demarcation or border. The unstated psychology in Blackwill’s plan is to segregate the malleable northern minority groups (Tajik, Uzbek, and Turcoman, who have a long and storied history of foreign collaboration, and to render them separate and distinct from the Pashtun community. The Pashtuns, who form the backbone of the national liberation movement or Resistance, are population dominant in the southern areas of the country, residing in their ancestral heartland. But as history forewarns, establishing ethnic-specific enclaves is fraught with numerous and insurmountable problems. What, for example, would become of the vast numbers of itinerant Pashtuns who reside in the north of Afghanistan and the myriad of ethnic minorities who currently inhabit the south? Such a Draconian plan would lead to rapid and widespread migrations between two countries. As an example, following the cessation of hostilities in World War II, in Korea and Vietnam, hundreds-of-thousands, if not millions migrated across borders very rapidly.  People left behind families, homes, businesses, and the burial sites of their ancestors. The migrations, often-times accompanied by government-militia threats of violence, led to war between migrating groups. In yet another of historic, catastrophic, and dehumanizing examples, the partition of India in 1947, resulted in two million deaths.

Public Relations Pretext: The administration, in order to sell this politically-expedient plan to an increasingly skeptical American and international jury, has laid the groundwork through their media and academic-affiliates to present the measure as a strategic counterinsurgency tactic with which to negate Taliban rule and defeat the insurgency , while in reality, it serves to defy and deny an entity that represents a national liberation movement that continues to be falsely accused of complicity in 9/11 and cast as allies of al-Qaeda by the administration and their media co-conspirators. As well, the pretext will contextualize the plan as an altruistic endeavor to restore an eclectic, harmonious ethnic balance and as a cultural bridge, restore women’s rights. Alas, the real story likely will fall victim to a media-generated conspiracy of silence as has much of the facts surrounding the prosecution of an illegal, codified ‘war of aggression’ in Afghanistan.

Durand Line: Afghanistan, long seen as the “Crossroads to Asia” has wide experience with international- superpower gerrymandering, (in today’s jargon, globalization) and boasts a stormy-history of partition (1893) and quasi-partition (1981).  In 1893, the British Indian government demarcated the highly controversial Durand Line, a line drawn by dishonest, technocratic- cartographers, ostensibly to delineate Afghan and British spheres of influence. The result of Durand was to bifurcate or dismember the many Pashtun tribes on both sides of the Indo/Afghan border and create cleavages among the tribes of Baluchistan as well. To this day, the calls for a Greater Pashtunistan and a renunciation of the Durand Line remain as vigilant and as vocal as during the nineteenth century among scores of the disenfranchised. (See:Afghanistan, Political Frailty and External Interference, P.60, Dr. Nabi Misdaq, 2006).

Operation Kaskad: December 1981, Afghan President Babrak Karmal was instructed while in Moscow by Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev to lay the groundwork for a reinforcement of the Soviet presence in Afghanistan.  To accomplish and or facilitate this subversive strategy, a plan, ‘Operation Kaskad’ for the annexation of nine of Afghanistan’s northern, provinces into their co-ethnic republics of the U.S.S.R. was drafted. The resultant southern partitioned enclave would remain a nominally independent and Pashtun dominated state of Pashtunistan, which could then serve as a catalyst for Soviet induced irredentist, propaganda and other subversive interests and or movements. The Soviets were especially interested in the Kunduz, Samangan, Badakhshan, Baghlan, Takhar, Balkh, Jowzjan, Badghis and Faryab provinces. This move would have enabled the U.S.S.R. to pacify the region without relying on costly, military operations, and to secure critical lines of communication and supply. The population of the northern environs are predominantly Tajik and Uzbek, and ethnically similar to the Soviet Republics to the north. (See: The Fall of Kabul has not slowed the Pace of Regional Strategic Change, Yosef Bodansky, 1992, Afghanistan, Political Frailty and External Interference, Dr. Nabi Misdaq, 2006, Afghanistan, a Search for Truth, Bruce G. Richardson, 2009, Afghanistan, Ending the Reign of Soviet Terror, Bruce G. Richardson, 1996).

Though the Soviets were denied their subversive-goals and vision surrounding the annexation and incorporation of the north of Afghanistan into the U.S.S.R., they were however, emboldened with their success in recruiting proxy-militia forces from among the northern minorities. Accordingly, the Soviets published a map during 1981, in which the projected partitioning and annexation of the north of Afghanistan is designated as the sixteenth Soviet Republic. In yet another revealing document from Cold War Soviet Archives, as well published by the Soviets, portions of the north would be united within the context of a “Greater Tajikistan” under the semi-autonomous, co-administered leadership of Moscow and Ahmad Shah Massoud, long a KGB and GRU asset. (See: Agreement between A.S Massoud and the Soviet Fortieth Army, Afghanistan, Ending the Reign of Soviet Terror, Bruce  G.Richardson, pp. 25-29, 1996, Afghanistan, Political Frailty and External Interference,Dr. Nabi Misdaq, p.330N, 2006).

In the coming days and weeks we will likely experience a pro-war, media barrage of deception as a result of the administration’s liberal use of emotion, passion, nuance, innuendo, and falsehoods as literary devices with which to seek, project and or render an acceptable and humanistic quality to their so-called “Plan B”, the official administration designation for the partition of Afghanistan.

But, as the historical record certifies, partition; also known as (social engineering) results not only in a spike of gratuitous violence… but an exponential increase in ethnic and religious discrimination, familial dislocation and dispossession as well.

In summation, partition represents but an ugly metaphor rising from the ashes of the Colonial, Post- World War I, Post- World War II, and Cold War eras.